Medicine: Conquest of Cataract

For more than 3,000 years, doctors were balked in their efforts to
restore anything like normal vision to elderly eyes clouded by
cataracts. In modern times they have been able to cut into the eyeball,
remove the cataract-clouded lens, and try to make up for the loss of
the lens by spectacles. But they have not dared to insert a substitute
in the eyeball. Now a British eye surgeon reports a way to do just
that: a carefully ground lens made of plastic is slipped into the
eyeball during the operation and stays there.